[extropy-chat] Is there a book on everything?

Wed Nov 30 16:50:25 UTC 2005

At 10:25 AM 11/30/2005 +0000, BillK wrote:

> > why do you need "a book" when you have google?
> > why do you need "a book" when you can have 7 dedicated books?
>
>The problem with google is that if you search on, say, "big bang
>theory" you get around 5 million hits, including much junk

Yes, I was far too glib in my quick response to Diego's request, and sent 
him a couple of titles off-list, but it occurs to me now that the closest 
to what he needs might be Timothy Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way, 
and his The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report, two general 
books from the late 1990s. John Gribbin has an even more comprehensive but 
easily-read book but I can't retrieve the title (despite google and amazon, 
damn it); it might be In the Beginning. Heinz R. Pagels' various books are 
splendid.

Here's the "Recommended reading" section from my own book THE LAST MORTAL 
GENERATION, now a bit out of date (I'd add Brian Greene's books on string 
theory, etc etc); some are very simple; a few, like the Kauffman, are 
horribly difficult:

LIFE

Per Bak, How Nature Works: The Science of Organized Criticality, Oxford
University Press, 1997

William R. Clark, At War Within: The Double-Edged Sword of Immunity, Oxford
University Press, 1995, and Sex and the Origins of Death, Oxford University
Press, 1996

Peter Coveney and Roger Highfield, Frontiers of Complexity: The Search for
Order in a Chaotic World, Faber, 1995

Paul Davies, The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin of Life, Allen
Lane, 1998

Richard Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable, Viking, 1996

Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of
Life, Allen Lane, 1995

Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the
Last 13,000 Years, Jonathan Cape, 1997

Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of
History, Penguin, 1991, and Life's Grandeur, Jonathan Cape, 1997

George Johnson, Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith and the Search for Order,
Viking, 1995

Stuart A. Kauffman, The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection
in Evolution, Oxford University Press, 1993

Roger Lewin, Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos, Dent, 1993

Randolph M. Nesse and George C. Williams, Evolution and Healing: The New
Science of Darwinian Medicine, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995

Robert Pool, The New Sexual Revolution, Hodder and Stoughton, 1993

Lee M. Silver, Remaking Eden: Cloning and Beyond in a Brave New World,
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998

M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order
and Complexity, Viking, 1992

George C. Williams, Plan & Purpose in Nature, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996

Edward O. Wilson, Naturalist, Allen Lane, 1994

Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: The New Science of Evolutionary
Psychology, Little, Brown, 1994

MIND

Margaret Boden, The Creative Mind, rev. edn, Cardinal, 1992

William H. Calvin, How Brains Think: Evolving Intelligence, Then and Now,
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996, and The Cerebral Code: Thinking a Thought in
the Mosaics of the Mind, MIT Press, 1996

William H. Calvin and Derek Bickerton, Lingua ex Machina: Reconciling
Darwin and Chomsky with the human brain, MIT Press, 2001

David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory,
Oxford University Press, 1996

Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain,
Picador, 1994

Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, Allen Lane, 1992

Gerald Edelman, Brilliant Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of Mind, Allen
Lane, 1992

Howard Gardner, The Mind's New Science: A History of the Cognitive
Revolution, Basic Books, 1985

Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid,
Penguin, 1980, Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and
Pattern, Viking, 1985, and Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of
Language, Basic Books, 1997

Douglas R. Hofstadter, and Daniel C. Dennett, eds, The Mind's I: Fantasies
and Reflections on Self and Soul, Penguin, 1982

Jerome Kagan, Galen's Prophecy: Temperament in Human Nature, Basic Books, 1994

John McCrone, The Myth of Irrationality: The Science of the Mind from Plato
to Star Trek, Macmillan, 1993

Steven Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind: A Search for the Origins of Art,
Religion and Science, Thames and Hudson, 1996

Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct, Allen Lane, 1994, and How the Mind
Works, Allen Lane, 1997

Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, Figments of Reality: The Evolution of the
Curious Mind, Cambridge University Press, 1997

Semir Zeki, A Vision of the Brain, Blackwell, 1993

QUANTUM

John Barrow, Theories of Everything: The Quest for Ultimate Explanation,
Oxford University Press, 1991, and Impossibility: The Limits of Science and
the Science of Limits, Oxford University Press, 1998

Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity
in a Complex World, Penguin, 1995

David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality, Allen Lane, 1997

Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and
the Complex, Little, Brown, 1994

John Gribbin, Schrödinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality, Weidenfeld
& Nicolson, 1995

Gerard Milburn, Quantum Technology, Allen & Unwin, 1996, and The Feynman
Processor: An Introduction to Quantum Computation, Allen & Unwin, 1998

Heinz R. Pagels, The Cosmic Code: Quantum Physics as the Language of
Nature, Pelican, 1984

Lewis Wolpert, The Unnatural Nature of Science, Faber, 1992

COSMOS

John Barrow and Frank Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, Oxford
University Press, 1986

Paul Davies, The Cosmic Blueprint: Order and Complexity at the Edge of
Chaos, Heinemann, 1987, The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a
Rational World, Simon and Schuster, 1992, and About Time: Einstein's
Unfinished Revolution, Viking, 1995

Timothy Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way, Vintage, 1988, and The
Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report, Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
1997

John Gribbin, Companion To The Cosmos, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996

Dennis Overbye, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, HarperCollins, 1991

Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997

Kip S. Thorne, Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy,
Picador, 1994

John Archibald Wheeler, At Home in the Universe, American Institute of
Physics, 1994

DEFEATING AGEING AND DEATH

Damien Broderick, The Spike: Accelerating into the Unimaginable Future,
Reed Books/New Holland, 1997 [and revised 2001]

Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future, Pan Books (revised edn), 1983

K. Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology,
Doubleday Anchor, 1986, and Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery,
Manufacturing, and Computation, John Wiley, 1992

Robert C. W. Ettinger, The Prospect of Immortality, New York: Doubleday,
1964  (available on the Web at: http://www.cryonics.org/book1.html)

Robert C. W. Ettinger, Man into Superman, New York: St. Martin's Press,
1972  (available on the Web at: http://www.cryonics.org/book2.html)

Michael Fossel, Reversing Human Aging, William Morrow, 1996

Roger Gosden, Cheating Time: Science, Sex, and Ageing, W. H. Freeman, 1996

Leonard Hayflick, How and Why We Age, Ballantine Books, 1996

Michio Kaku, Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century and
Beyond, Oxford University Press, 1998

John J. Medina, The Clock of Ages: Why We Age, How We Age, Winding Back the
Clock, Cambridge University Press, 1996

Hans Moravec, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence,
Harvard University Press, 1988

Ed Regis, Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition, Viking, 1991,
and Nano! Remaking the World Atom by Atom, Bantam, 1995

David W. E. Smith, Human Longevity, Oxford University Press, 1993

Bruce Sterling, Holy Fire, Millennium, 1996